Seed Money Fellow (Plattform "Transformations and Eastern Europe")

Eva-Maria Walther is a Social Anthropologist working on civil society, migration and the public space. She is currently a Seed Money Fellow at the Research Platform for the Study of Transformations and Eastern Europe.

Research project at RECET

An urban ethnography of ugliness: Relating past and present in Czech and Slovak cities through ‘visual smog’. 

This project explores how urban publics in Czech Republic and Slovakia dispute the political and cultural meanings of urban spaces and their appearance. It does so by studying through ethnographic fieldwork the controversy surrounding ‘visual smog’ (cz: vizuální smog / sk: vizuálny smog), a term used to describe the accumulation of attention-seeking, dazzling, and eclectic visual stimuli in the public space, especially advertisement. In turning visual smog into a political problem, the (re)design of public space becomes a platform for negotiating interpretations of the past as well as the future of urban spaces.